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America's First Terror War
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Today's Stories May 25, 2007 David Vest
Franklin Lamb Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fantina Norman Solomon Dave Lindorff Sen. Russell
Feingold Fred Gardner Mike Whitney Kevin Parsneau, Arjun Chowdhury
and Mark Hoffman Caroline Paul Eva Liddell Website of
the Day
Patrick Cockburn Rev. William
Alberts Joe DeRaymond Sudhanva Deshpande
Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Rannie Amiri China Hand Zoe Blunt Nivien Saleh Website of the Day
Robert Fisk Joshua Frank Harvey Wasserman David Mos Masumoto Sonja Karkar Conn Hallinan Dave Lindorff Jeffrey Kolakowski Evelyn Pringle Jim Baumer Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Nicole Colson John Ross Stephen Fleischman M. Shahid Alam Ron Jacobs Peter Rost, MD Alan Farago Paul Buchheit Website of
the Day
May 19 / 20, 2007 Andrew Cockburn Uri Avnery Peter Gelderloos Saul Landau Robert Fantina Fred Gardner Ralph Nader Jean Daniels Reza Fiyouzat Missy Beattie Robert Alvarez Sonja Karkar Dave Lindorff Jeff Sher Julian C. Holmes Clancy Sigal Prairie Miller James Murren Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 18, 2007 Adam Jones Sharon Smith Christopher Brauchli Peter Rost,
MD Denise Maloney Pictou David Swanson Ali Khan Susan Rosenthal,
M.D. Samer Assad CP News Service Website of the Day
May 17, 2007 Tariq Ali Yifat Susskind Dave Zirin Brian J. Foley W. John Green Eric Johnson-DeBaufre Badruddin Khan Martha Rosenberg China Hand Dan Vojir Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Ashley Dawson Joshua Frank Corporate Crime
Reporter Ray McGovern Glen Ford Joe Bageant Sonja Karkar Mickey S. Huff John Chuckman Kaz Dziamka Website of
the Day
May 15, 2007 Michael Neumann Patrick Cockburn Ashley Smith Marc Gardner Dave Lindorff Ben Terrall Ron Jacobs Harvey Wasserman Marcus Mabry Dr. Susan Block Website of the Day
May 14, 2007 Jennifer Roesch Jeffrey St.
Clair George Bisharat Diane Wachtell Ramzy Baroud Rosemary and
Walter Brasch Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Roberto Rodriguez Jonathan Culp Website of
the Day
May 12 / 13, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Diane Farsetta Ralph Nader Jean Bricmont Marcus Breen Joe Bageant Conn Hallinan Fred Gardner Juan Santos
Eve Bachrach Missy Comley
Beattie Ron Jacobs Niranjan Ramakrishnan Susie Day Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend May 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Kathleen Christison Mike Ferner John Holt Laurie Hasbrook Christopher
Brauchli Margaret Kimberley Dave Lindorff Nicole Colson John V. Walsh Website of the Day
May 10, 2007 Tariq Ali Patrick Cockburn Neve Gordon Marjorie Cohn David Rosen Alan Farago John Hellman Kathy Rentenbach BANCO Richard Rhames Website of the Day
Jeff Leys Patrick Cockburn Glen Ford Paula Rothenberg Kathryn Weber John Chuckman Jordan Flaherty Dave Lindorff Stephen Lendman Website of
the Day
May 8, 2007 Dave Lindorff Patrick Cockburn Corporate Crime Reporter Ralph Nader Malini Johar Schueller Juan Santos Dave Zirin Joshua Frank Evelyn Pringle Eamonn McCann Website of the Day
May 7, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Monica Benderman Greg Moses Rannie Amiri Fitrakis / Wasserman Fred Wilhelms Ramzy Baroud Bruce K. Gagnon T. W. Croft Sonja Karkar Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn William Blum Uri Avnery Franklin Lamb Fred Gardner Lawrence R.
Velvel Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Carla Blank Linn Washington,
Jr. Stephen F. Jackson P. Sainath Anthony Papa James T. Phillips John Ross Stephen Lendman Ben Terrall CounterPunch
Newswire Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
May 4, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Azmi Bishara Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Kevin Zeese Bob Fitrakis Janet Kauffman Website of
the Day
May 3, 2007 Jeff Halper Christopher
Brauchli Dave Zirin Corporate Crime
Reporter Robert Fisk Mike Ferner Mike Whitney Pham Binh Dave Lindorff Michael A.
Johnson Website of the Day
May 2, 2007 Saul Landau Dr. Susan Block Carla Blank Margaret Kimberly Kevin Zeese Carlos Villareal Michael Dickinson Tim Shorrock Alevtina Rea William S.
Lind Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn Fred Gardner Chase Madar Ralph Nader John V. Walsh Joshua Frank Leslie Radford Shaun Harkin Dave Lindorff Peter Rost,
MD Peter Linebaugh Website of
the Day
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May 25, 2007 Whitewashing a Sell OutDemocratic Spin Won't End the War in IraqBy JOHN STAUBER After several months of empty posturing against the war in Iraq, politicians in Washington have made what Democratic congressman James P. Moran called a "concession to reality" by agreeing to give President Bush virtually everything he wanted in funding and unrestricted license to continue waging the increasingly detested war that has made Bush the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon. This is the outcome that we warned against two months ago when we wrote "Why Won't MoveOn Move Forward?" In it, we criticized MoveOn for backpedaling on its previously claimed objective of ending the war in Iraq immediately. Anti-war sentiment was the main factor behind last year's elections that brought Democrats to power in both houses of Congress. Once in power, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a "compromise" bill, supported by MoveOn, that offered $124 billion in supplemental funding for the war. To make it sound like they were voting for peace, the Democrats threw in a few non-binding benchmarks asking Bush to certify progress in Iraq, coupled with language that talked about withdrawing troops next year. Understanding how legislative processes work, we expected then that even those few nods to anti-war sentiment would be eliminated in due course. Bush had already said he would veto the Pelosi bill and pledged to hold out for funding without restrictions of any kind. Moreover, there was little doubt that the Democratic leadership would eventually cave to his demands. Notwithstanding their stage-managed photo ops and rhetorical flourishes for peace, prominent Democrats signaled early that they would give Bush the funding he wanted. Barack Obama even went so far as to state publicly that once Bush vetoed the original bill, Congress would approve the money because "nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground." (Two weeks later, MoveOn announced that it had polled its members, and Obama was their "top choice to lead the country out of Iraq.") In effect, the confrontation between Bush and the Democrats was a high-stakes game of poker in which the Democrats went out of their way to make it clear that they would fold once Bush called their bluff. Not everyone saw this coming, of course. Back in March, Salon.com called MoveOn's Eli Pariser "shrewdly pragmatic" for backing Pelosi's original supplemental war funding bill. It quoted Pariser predicting that after Bush was "forced to veto" Pelosi's bill, "That forces the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people." Similar "shrewd pragmatism" came from blogger and Democratic campaign consultant Matt Stoller at MyDD.com, praising MoveOn's "dedication to practical results" and calling the Pelosi bill "a major step forward ... Moveon was true to its members in helping this happen." Stoller criticized us by name for our naiveté in thinking otherwise:
A "tactic," as the dictionary explains, is "an expedient for achieving a goal." If the goal is to end the war in Iraq, the Pelosi bill was never a tactic that had any chance of succeeding. Its provisions had no teeth and it was clear that too many Democrats never intended to see the fight through. As this week's betrayal by the Democratic leadership demonstrates, ending the war is simply not their goal. Their goal is to continue the war for the time being, while giving themselves just enough distance from it that they can run as the anti-war party in next year's presidential and congressional elections. Stoller seems to have belatedly arrived at this realization himself. Responding to this week's news, he writes:
Amazingly, the conclusion that Stoller draws from these facts is the following non sequitur:
Here's the point that Stoller seems to have missed: There is a difference between what the public wants and what politicians do. Just because the high and mighty politicians don't get it yet, don't assume that the average American doesn't. It is not "the public" that needs to be persuaded. The politicians, their marketing campaigns, and the bloggers who join them may be "unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood," but the public at large fully understands that we need to get out of Iraq. The question is simply how to translate that public awareness into effective pressure that will force the politicians to change course. As we wrote in March, "When politicians and advocacy groups like MoveOn play anti-war games of political theater while effectively collaborating with the war's continuation, they merely add one more deception to the layers of lies in which this war has been wrapped." Since 2003 we've co-authored two books on Iraq, and we have been reporting on the war for over five years now, since we began to dissect the Bush administration's propaganda push almost immediately after 9/11. We've been reporting on MoveOn for almost as long. And by the way, we are not "ardent critics" of MoveOn, as Stoller claimed. We are trying to constructively criticize an organization whose leaders mean well, even though they have been selling a flawed strategy. MoveOn has emerged as a powerful political player with a massive email list of more than three million names and the ability to raise millions of dollars for Democrats while waging innovative PR campaigns around the environmental, political and social issues they promote. The bottom line, however, is that MoveOn until now has always been a big "D" Democratic Party organization. It began as an online campaign to oppose the impeachment of President Clinton, and its tactical alliances with Democratic politicians have made it part of the party's current power base, which melds together millionaire funders such as George Soros and the Democracy Alliance, liberal unions like SEIU, and the ballyhooed Netroots bloggers like Matt Stoller, Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos. At a personal level, we presume the members of this coalition genuinely want the war to end, but their true and primary priority is winning Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Now that the war in Iraq hangs like a rotting albatross around the neck of the Bush administration, it has become the Democrats' best weapon to successfully campaign against Republicans. From a "shrewdly pragmatic" point of view, therefore, they have no reason to want the war to end soon. Some Democrats (not the top politicians, of course) are saying this openly. Here, for example, is how one blogger at the Daily Kos sees things:
In this analysis, "more treasure and lives wasted" are the "little picture," while winning elections is "the big picture." Democrats like Russ Feingold who oppose the Iraq supplemental do not share this strategy, and it is never explicitly stated even by the Democratic politicians who are signing on this week to fund the war, but it is implicit in their actions. If you visit the MoveOn website today as we write, the top item on the page is a request for people to sign a petition against price gouging by oil companies. They're focused on the "big picture" of using the current spike in gasoline prices as an opportunity to build their email list, while the little picture of ending the war has fallen from the top of the page. Yesterday MoveOn began a campaign calling on Democrats to vote no on the Iraq supplemental. MoveOn is also talking for the first time about supporting primary challengers to Democrats who "ran on ending the war but vote for more chaos and more troops in Iraq." This belated spark of independence, however, is too little and too late to stop a deal that has already been struck, in which politicians that MoveOn has been supporting have just surrendered ground from a position of strength to a president and party that is weakened, on an issue of utmost importance to their country. MoveOn is expert at marketing, PR and advertising. Their emails to members convey a friendly, informal style and a sense that "they" are just like "us." But there are important differences between the organization and many of the people who sign their petitions and give them money. MoveOn has not been primarily a movement against the war. It has been a movement of Democrats to get the party back into power. We do not doubt that MoveOn's leadership sincerely believes they are pursuing the most practical and effective course to improve America's political problems by vanquishing the Republicans and getting Democrats elected. However, when given a choice between building a powerful grassroots movement to end the war, versus exploiting the war for the benefit of getting Democrats elected, MoveOn has repeatedly chosen the latter while probably believing there is no difference. There is an organized anti-war movement in America that is not an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Up until now, it has been weak and divided and unable to organize itself into an effective national movement in its own right. In its place, therefore, MoveOn and its Netroots allies have become identified as the leadership of the anti-war movement. It is vitally important, however, that a genuinely independent anti-war movement organize itself with the ability to speak on its own behalf. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the civil rights movement was most definitely not an adjunct of the Democratic or Republican Parties. Far from it, it was a grassroots movement that eventually forced both parties to respond to its agenda. Likewise, the movement against the Vietnam War was not aligned with either the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which claimed to have plans for peace while actually pursuing policies that expanded the war. That's the sort of movement we need again, if we wish to see peace in our lifetime. John Stauber is Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin and co-author of Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever. He can be reached at: john@prwatch.org
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